Advice needed after bad brew day

[Remos112]

Hello everybody, so todat I tried to brew Revvy's Leffe Blonde clone and it didn't work out too great. I had the brilliant idea to put my Filterhex directly in the kettle to save time by not having to carry the mash to a seperate filter tank. This however had some unintended consequences. The mashing went great and the sparging went pretty good as well, although I did overshoot the water a bit so ended up with a preboil gravity of 1.040 instead of the calculated 1.047 The plan was to boil it a little longer to simple let more water vaporize, but then disaster struck. While boiling the thermostat started acting up and the kettle switch off several times. My only explanation would be the filterhex above the heating element influencing it somehow. Not much I could do here but try to finish the boil. Ended up with [email protected] instead of 20l 1.064 so quite a bit off. I cooled it to 21C and pitch 3 packs of wyeast 1762 and hoped for the best. The target ABV would be quite a bit off.

As far as I see it I have 2 options
1 Let it ride out and end up with probably a perfectly delicious beer with lower abv.
2 Add something like DME sugar honey or some other kind of fermentables.

What would you guys advice? Let it ride out, or tinker with it some bit?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Remi

 

[steved53]

Leave it.
It'll probably be even more drinkable than what you intended!

 

[Remos112]

Leave it.
It'll probably be even more drinkable than what you intended!

Thanks. I kinda was hoping for an answer like this.

 

[Remos112]

One other thing I am worried abouth though, did I boil off enough nasties like DMS? the brew was in the kettle for +/- 2 hours but not at a rolling boil as the kettle switched off time to time

 

[Dr_Jeff]

Nothing can be done to fix it at this point, so just wait it out and drink the resulting beer.

 

[eric19312]

One other thing I am worried abouth though, did I boil off enough nasties like DMS? the brew was in the kettle for +/- 2 hours but not at a rolling boil as the kettle switched off time to time

This should be plenty of boiling to get rid of any DMS precursors. It's apparently not commonly seen with modern malts. Perhaps was a bigger issue in the past but in these forums and others you can find lots of people claiming to get away with very short boils with 100% pilsner malt bills without running into DMS.

 

[anotherbeerplease]

I'd add 1.2lbs extra light dme, should get you up to 1.064. Otherwise it sounds like you're in good shape, if just a little discouraged

 

[Remos112]

Thanks for all the imput guys. Right now it is fermenting like mad so I decided to just let it ride out. It smells delicious by the way!

 

[Remos112]

Here's some update
The beer finished out at 1.010 and 5,7% ABV.
bottled about 5 weeks ago and it is just now starting to turn really great.

Very good head retention and nice full body very drinkable.

Sadly just like all my other beers it suffers from chill haze. I am thinking of using gelatin in the near future to see if this helps me with this issue.

All in all a very drinkable result!

 

[RM-MN]

Here's some update
The beer finished out at 1.010 and 5,7% ABV.
bottled about 5 weeks ago and it is just now starting to turn really great.

Very good head retention and nice full body very drinkable.

Sadly just like all my other beers it suffers from chill haze. I am thinking of using gelatin in the near future to see if this helps me with this issue.

All in all a very drinkable result!

Put several bottles of your beer in the refrigerator and leave them for a few days and see if you don't eliminate the chill haze. If so, just keep a rotation going where you remove the amount of beer you are going to drink in one day (one at a time) and replace that amount with fresh bottles. I have enough beer in the refrigerator for 7 days so each bottle gets a week for the chill haze to settle out.

 

[Remos112]

Put several bottles of your beer in the refrigerator and leave them for a few days and see if you don't eliminate the chill haze. If so, just keep a rotation going where you remove the amount of beer you are going to drink in one day (one at a time) and replace that amount with fresh bottles. I have enough beer in the refrigerator for 7 days so each bottle gets a week for the chill haze to settle out.

I have had 2 different brews in the fridge both crystal clear at room temp but hazy like the one above. They Just wouldn’t clear. All this Beer were from the same 25kg bag of pilsner malt wich is my suspect . Next time I’ll give cold crashing with gelatin a go!